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GCTTB
I love mead so naturally I had to try this tea. Given the Darjeeling base I lowered the steeping temperature from the usual boiling water I usually use with black teas. It tastes very much like a Darjeeling with that slightly astringent, muscatel wine flavour. As the tea cools off I can taste the smoother sweet honey flavour. It’s a great idea for a tea blend, I just wish a bit more of the honey flavour came through initially.

GCTTB
Pretty standard ginger peach tea. It’s not bad by any means, but not really remarkable. It’s actually quite similar to the ginger peach tea that Davids Tea carries. It is nice that this one is decaf though so I can drink it after 4pm and not have to worry about being wired all night long. :D

GCTTB
The steeping recommendations suggested using 5g of tea but since I didn’t want to use up the entire sample, I took half and went for a bit of a longer steep time instead.

I rinsed the buds for 20 sec before steeping.

1st step at 1.5 min was rather weak and the flavour was a strange combination of mineral and mustiness and I almost gave up right there. But I decided to give it another go.

2nd steep at 3 min: The flavour was much more developed but still quite low-key. It’s sweeter and not as musty-tasting.

I’m only so-so about this tea. I’ve had other pu-erh buds that have been much nicer and more flavourful.

GCTTB
The scent of this dry tea is of sweet vanilla cream, but when I poured in the water the distinct smell of lavender curled up and out of the cup. The flavour is pleasent mix of the two, and there’s also a faint berry-like flavour that goes nicely with the creamy vanilla. The lavender is just the right amount to give the blend a bit of spicy without being too pungent.

GCTTB
I love the name of this tea – it was the first thing that caught my eye. The combination of flavours is unusual but they manage to work quite well. The sage is subtle and doesn’t make me think I’m drinking a cup of poultry seasoning and the blackberry is distinct and not just some hibiscus pretending to be blackberry. The keemun base is pretty mild compared to others I’ve tried and maybe that’s all to the good; the dense chocolate or smoke notes I get from some keemuns might end up drowning out the flavours in this tea. A really interesting tea that I would find myself tempted to buy if I wasn’t flat broke right now. :D

GCTTB Sipdown
Creamy blueberry is a pretty accurate assessment of the flavour of this tea, though it has a bit more tangy tartness than what you’d get from a blueberry. Sea buckthorn is a pretty rare flavour to find in a tea and I wish more companies would experiment with interesting fruits and berries like this.

Another tea from a previous round of the GCTTB I think. The package was unopened so despite being a little bit older (I’m not sure how old but I know it not this year’s picking) the tea was still relatively fresh. The flavours were strongly vegetable but with almost none of the bitterness you find in lower-quality green teas. There’s also a lightly savory undercurrent, though it wasn’t super-pronounced. As a whole the tea came across and being very fresh and crisp.

I love quinces, a friend of mine brought a bunch back from Iran and I’ve been cooking and making jam with them ever since. So I pounced on this when I saw it was Davids Tea of the Month.

The scent of the dry tea is odd and bit overpowering, it’s a very sweet, almost bubblegum like smell. There a bit of that odd perfuminess in the flavour, especially as the tea cools but there’s a sour undercurrent (thanks hibiscus). I can taste the actually quince flavours, the closest thing I can compare it to is a mix of pear and apple, but there’s just something off about the flavour profile that I don’t care for. It’s coming across as too artificial and sweet maybe.

I was actually given this tea by my coworkers while I was laid up in the hospital in January. Unfortunately I was on blood thinners at the time and, as I discovered, blood thinners interact with EVERYTHING. Fast forward to now and I’m off blood thinners (thank god, they’re awful) so I can finally try this tea.

The smell of the dry is lovely, it’s a cross between sweet apple and basil. Unfortunately the nuances of the other ingredients aren’t really present in the flavour and the tea most just tastes like basil – which is pleasent enough but not a tea I’d go out of my way to drink. Oh well it’s the thought that counts.

Butiki has the cinnamon gauged just right for this tea. It’s distinct without that overpowering liquid cinnamon hearts candy taste that other cinnamon blends can take on. It has a pleasent, gentle warmth rather than trying to scorch out your taste buds.